absorbing life's of experiences one day at a time

My iPhone apps are busy cleaning…

I have noticed lately that a couple of my apps have been “cleaning…” This raised a few questions with me. Why are they cleaning themselves? What are they cleaning? And why hasn’t Apple addressed this in depth?

Apparently, with iOS 5 it is not uncommon for your apps to clean themselves. As in the screenshot of my iPhone above, the label under the app, In my case Pinterest, will change to “Cleaning…” Apple has not exactly explained this cleaning function in detail, hence why there are so many queries about it.

So, when your apps are cleaning themselves, they are basically deleting cache and temporary files so when iCloud or iTunes backs everything up the backup is faster and has less data to backup.

Since Apple added iCloud and Wi-Fi syncing, it has been important to keep app data as clean and compact as possible for back up efficiency. Otherwise us Apple users would be sitting in front of our MacBooks frustrated waiting around for minutes or hours for everything to backup.

The cleaning function for the iOS 5.0 is also responsible for apps losing locally cached articles. But that has been fixed with the third storage option between documents and cache, it the storage that does not get cleaned but also does not get backed up.

So next time your iPhone, iPad, or iTouch apps start cleaning themselves, have no fear. It is just the iOS 5 keeping your device working as Apple products should!